~Finally back! Man, if we don't get some new episodes soon, I'm going to be all caught up. Don't quite know what would happen then.
Oh, well. Enjoy!~
You stare at the back of Blue Diamond's head, seeing only a meteor ready to collide with the planet you have come to love as your own, exterminating several billion life forms, including the ones most valuable to you.
"You're them!" she says, her voice no more than a fierce breath. "The Ruby and Sapphire who disrupted my court!"
She remembers, too, though you doubt it is with the same intense regret you feel when you look back on the scene: The Ruby threw herself on the Sapphire, fulfilling her Purpose to protect her, and with a flash their beings merged into a swirl of red, pink, purple, and blue, like a sunset sky. She was gawky and contrary to everything you had been Taught about fusion, yet there was also something…striking about her. The very air around you convulsed in disdain as everyone else on the base stared at the forbidden fusion with twisted lips. Blue Diamond's finger slashed forward, accusing the Ruby and sentencing her in the same speck of time.
An angry mob lurched forward, Gems who wore your hair in more strictly controlled styles and your gemstone in different places. In the chaos of elbows and rage, it was easy for a small, reticent Lapis to swoop away.
Long afterwards, you were gathered with the other members of Blue Diamond's court when another Lapis Lazuli, the one whose appearance modifiers were loose and flowed about her, giving the impression that her entire physical form was composed of the element she controlled, spoke up. "Did you hear about that Junk-cut Fusion? The Ruby that messed with Sapphire, I mean? I heard she ran away and joined the Rebel forces. On Earth."
You pictured Pearl's spear, Rose Quartz's sword, and Blue Diamond's finger, and suddenly you questioned the security of the ground beneath you. "Really?" you said.
Every eye turned in your direction, surprised; you rarely spoke, even to them, unless one of them addressed you directly, your shoulders always clamped together. "I mean…do you know that for sure?" you amended. "I thought maybe the Diamonds had already caught that Ruby and shattered her." You glanced around at the faces so like yours and yet harder, heavier, as though they were formed deeper in the planet's mantle. "Has anyone seen her around here?"
Another Lapis – the one who was never without a thin, shallow smile – let out a high-pitched giggle, the sound of glass meeting stone. "Who can tell? All Rubies look alike anyway."
You distinctly remember that you nodded.
When Blue Diamond first looked at Garnet the way she surely looks at her now, you were too cowardly to do anything. This time, everything is different; you are different. You hold the barn alongside you, kept up by a lake where you have dunked your feet and splashed your friends, a lake that talked to you coaxingly as you overcame your fear of it, and a lake that even now awaits with unwavering obedience your next order. Your powers soar inside you, bigger than what your physical form should be able to contain. For the briefest of moments, you wonder if this is how Rose Quartz felt when she realized she had the capacity to destroy her own Diamond.
"I'm not defeating you," you hear Garnet say. "I just needed to keep you from taking three steps to your right."
The grand blue head swivels your direction, and you stare into the limpid-lashed eyes that have been providing you with comfort and tranquility and lies from the very first day. They narrow at you, a vehement look that would have made you run away five thousand years ago. Even today, your emotions begin to shake within you, but your powers are sturdier, trickling into whatever weak places they can find, filling them, and tightening.
Blue Diamond's arm rears back, and there is no time, no time to crawl inside and find the baseball bat or the broom, no time to rescue your meepmorps or the wonderful, golden-orange leaf that changed the course of your life. There is only time to transmit a silent apology.
Your shoulders rise; you hurl your second home on top of your first and watch them both crumple.
Sand sprays upward. Blue Diamond disappears, covered by rubble and ruin.
Eyes that have been squeezed shut open, blinking, as the slick tears Blue Diamond falsified into them are wiped away. Mouths go slack. Arms spring out from sides as if they have received an electrical shock.
"Forgot my toothbrush," you say with a shrug.
A chuckle deep as a cavern river rolls out of someone. You glance down and see Dr. Drakken looking back up at you. He is the only one not gaping. Though his grin is akimbo, protruding, and tearful, there is no surprise in it, only the gleam of anticipation fulfilled.
You see Steven, as beautiful as ever in clothing black and gleaming like oil puddles, a tiny butterfly of fabric cinched beneath his chin. You see Amethyst on her hands and knees on the ground, and you see Pearl crouched next to her, appearing to have frozen partway through reaching down to help her up. On the porch, you see Greg in black clothing that matches Steven's, holding someone who you at first think is a baby but soon discover to be Peridot instead, her eyes about to break through her visor.
You see…Bismuth.
Bismuth? What in the stars is she doing here?
In your memory, that massive fist drives at you again, but you stop it with your own hand, though all five of your fingers could fold and fit neatly on a single one of hers. At this point, she is one more person standing between Steven and the Diamonds. The rest will be for later.
You swing yourself to the ground, avoiding the broken pieces of your barn by a distance of several Earth-yards, and plunge your feet into Earth's sand, touched by the sun the way it was when you first met Dr. Drakken. Warm and soft and smooth, it gives your feet the same welcoming kiss the grass did. You are surprised by how earnestly you laugh, given how long it has been since you last did so.
Behind you, all is silent, even as Peridot screeches and attempts to claw her way straight over Greg's shining scalp toward you. Blue Diamond does not move; she does not make a sound. You wonder if she has been shattered. It is probably best for everyone if she has been shattered, yet not every facet in your gem agrees, begging an intact diamond to surface from the wreckage for your fellow Crystal Gems to bubble.
It all stops mattering for a while, however, when Steven runs to you from across the beach, stopping only in the instant before he would trod on your toes. "Lapis?" he says, as if he fears you might be nothing more than a hallucination.
You reach forward and touch his shoulder, something you know from your own nightmarish experiences a hallucination cannot do. His kind, precious face stares up at you. For the first time in centuries – perhaps for the first time in your existence at all – you have found something worth more to you than your own life. "Room for one more?" you ask him.
Steven's lower lip begins to quiver. "Always," he says, and he leans forward and wraps you in a hug softer and warmer than the sand and greater than any hold Blue Diamond has ever had on you. Your bare back is a canal, stuck closed for so many tides and now overflowing with everything that has built up on the other side since you locked it up.
"You can hug later," a low voice says. Two large bluish-gray hands reach for you, stopped only centimeters from your skin by Dr. Drakken's vicious growl. Bismuth backs up a step, palms raised in surrender, and jerks her head. "Look alive!" she snaps.
You turn in the direction her head points. From the jumbled heap that you can now see was once a yellow arm-ship strides a figure as tall as a palace. Her body glints in one shade of harsh gold, with none of Blue Diamond's subtlety or nuance. Only the whites of her eyes are different, and there is no relief to be found looking into them. They are focused with the flat precision of Steven's lion stalking a lizard: nothing personal there, but nothing merciful either.
An enormous hand rises from what remains of the barn, pushing aside boards, rafters, and meepmorps – no more than refuse to her. Blue Diamond rises to her feet, as stately as ever.
You position yourself in front of the people you love, in the air since you are not tall enough to shield Drakken or Garnet from the ground. Your hands lift, and you feel the thrumming loyalty of the Earth's ocean against them, welcoming you back.
Blue Diamond's face is tight and betrayed as it turns toward you. "Lapis Lazuli," she breathes, not adding a at the beginning or your facet-class number, which you have long forgotten by now, at the end. She speaks to you as if you are the only one. She always spoke to you as if you were the only one. "Does every Gem who comes in contact with this filthy planet turn traitor?"
Her voice runs thick with disappointment and something akin to hate, clenching tight around the words you no longer recognize as your name. They were the first words you ever heard her utter upon being presented to her after your Emergence, when she inspected you from your gemstone to your wings and your bare feet while you performed your first shy curtsy. Lapis Lazuli, she chuckled, her eyes crinkling in quiet pleasure.
A wave thrashes against your back, demanding you fold, but you don't listen to it. You remain, looking straight at the Diamond who was once the center of your world, around which everything else revolved, and you decline to give her an answer.
Blue Diamond raises both hands to the sides of her head, her forehead contorted as she weeps. Your vision blurs over as she sends her pain into you, and you hear the others fall to the ground and begin to sob. It is hard and heavy, her pain, but it is also old, and it has crusted over, the way clay will do if too long exposed to the sun. It is pain that knows nothing of how it feels to be locked in a fusion with someone who despises you or to gaze at the stars from behind glass or even to realize the shelf in the barn where Dr. Drakken would spread his sleeping bag is no more. As you stare at Blue Diamond in defiance, tears pouring down your cheeks, you wonder, suddenly, if this why she keeps all the Elite confined to lives of safety and happiness: so that when she needs to influence them, her pain will be the harshest thing they have ever had to feel.
She failed to keep you safe, and now it is only fitting that you fail her.
You toss the tears away with the back of your wrist. They are not yours, and the water seems eager to escape. "I've felt worse," you say.
Behind you, another sound joins the ruckus – a rasping, shuddering, booming wail that can only belong to Dr. Drakken. Your gem clenches tighter to your skin.
"What are you doing?" you hear Connie say. "We're immune!"
"Not to her!" Drakken cries, and you do not have to see him to know he points at you.
You gather the largest chain of the ocean you can grab with Blue Diamond's powers grating against yours, pull backward, and slam it into the back of her head. She barely flinches, but her hands drop to her sides for an instant, and the tears cease all around. Amethyst cracks her whip at Blue Diamond's knees, and Pearl blindly pushes her spear into the gauzy fabric that drapes her.
Blue Diamond rears back and swats at them, though they are too fast for her to catch. A bolt of blue energy forms on one of her fingers, aimed directly into the little crowd. You throw yourself facedown on the sand, grabbing Peridot's arm on the way and pulling her down with you. The bolt passes over you with a chill that reminds you of Kanatar's ocean.
After a few Earth-seconds of silence, you lift your head in time to see Peridot doing the same, her visor cracked but her gem intact. "Hi, Peri," you say. "What's new?"
Peridot responds with the squeal of a baby dolphin and a squeeze of your neck, so enthusiastic that a human would drown inside the hold. Yet you are not a human, and there is no reason for you to keep from grinning as you slip free.
Blue Diamond throws another wave of energy forward. This one lunges straight for you, and when you jump away from it, you collide with Dr. Drakken, who is jumping toward you.
The two of you collapse to the ground.
Drakken rubs his backside with one hand, and you seize the other and pull him upright. "You okay?" you ask him.
He nods rapidly. "Yes, I'm fine, L – L – Lapis!" Drakken's buoy-words jerk to an abrupt halt, as if someone has yanked firmly on their line. "Lapis!" he repeats. "Oh, Lapis, Lapis, Lapis!"
You smile at him. "At last," you say, "somebody got my name right."
You start to swivel back to address Blue Diamond again, yet before you are even halfway turned, you suddenly stop, jog the few steps back to Drakken, throw your arms around his waist, and bury your face in his coat-of-labs. His own arms are too bewildered to return the hug, and that is okay. He smells of plants and sweat, of cleaning agents and what you can now identify as sugar.
For the first time in your existence, home has a scent.
You let yourself take it in for another moment, and then you let go and reach for the ocean again. With Blue Diamond's ship blocking the sunlight, the sky looks dark and lonely, but beneath it, you have never felt less so.
By now, Yellow Diamond has disentangled herself from her ruined ship, and she stomps away to Blue Diamond's side, her footsteps sending grains of sand gushing upward in miniscule geysers. Unlike Blue Diamond, who carries some softness in her still, there is no possibility for forgiveness in Yellow Diamond's gaze, and there never has been. As she runs it over you, your friends, and Bismuth, you are remembering the sense of dread that always came over you when she entered a room, a sense far more acute now. Wood crunches beneath her feet, and you try not to picture her treading on your leaf or Peridot's biscuit-shaped chair, the lumpy one that has no back or arms until someone sits on it and they bulge into place around her.
Before Yellow Diamond can make her first move, you braid the ocean into a whip this time and flail her with it as hard as you can, harder than you hit Blue Diamond. Her back arches, and she begins to take a step your way only to be attacked from above by six or seven small metal cans that you believe contain the fizzing liquid Steven likes to drink sometimes. They pound against Yellow Diamond's head until dents appear in their sides and liquid begins to leak from their crushed tops. You don't even need to hear the shrill growl, so comically similar to Drakken's pink wolf-dog, beside you to know Peridot is the one who commands them.
A deep voice roughly edges its way in between you and Peridot. It has never spoken to you before, and the richness and warmth it carries seem to clash with what you know of its owner. "I like your spunk, Tiny!" Bismuth says to Peridot. "Here, let me help!"
You watch in horror as Bismuth snatches Peridot up into her arms and hurtles her, as though Peridot is another type of weapon, at Blue Diamond's head. Peridot flips through the air, end over end, and that is when you notice that she is wearing different clothes, a dress full of frills in gentle, vulnerable yellow, her shoes two pink patches. She lands directly on Blue Diamond's nose and straddles it, the way the humans on Camp Pining Hearts sit astride their horses, shoulders shaking with what you know to be a cackle.
Blue Diamond pulls backward, eyes startled, like you have seen Dr. Drakken back away from Earth insects when they fly in too close. With a bat of her arm, she sends Peridot tumbling, and Bismuth dives on her stomach, catching Peridot as you once caught a baseball.
"You've been here all along, haven't you, Rose?" Yellow Diamond calls to Steven, now tucked away behind his shield, his legs shaking. "How many more times will we have to destroy you and your little pockets of rebels?"
Garnet manifests her gauntlets and charges straight toward Yellow Diamond, their glow hot against the dimness.
"Go, Garnet!" Steven yells, and then turns to you and Peridot. "I don't suppose she'd listen if I told her I'm not Rose, huh?"
"No."
You and Peridot speak in unison, though Peridot is much more forceful, and she lifts her smallest finger and loops it in the air. "Link pinkies!" she says.
"I don't know what that means, and I don't have time to learn right now." You roll your eyes.
Peridot does not seem offended. She cries "RAWWWRRRR!" and charges down the sand dunes toward Yellow Diamond, dress hoisted away from her ankles. "Hey! Remember me?" She hollers at her former Diamond the way she hollers at everyone and everything, as though what works on the black-masked creatures can also work on Yellow Diamond.
You stop moving.
Yellow Diamond swings her molten eyes downward and surveys Peridot without vengeance or ferocity. She is a block of apathy as she says, "Hmmm. No."
Her hand tilts downward. Rays all too familiar to you flare to life at her fingertips. It is Yellow Diamond's Destabilizing energy, the energy that powers all the weaponry wielded by her Gems, including the Gems who originally served Pink Diamond. You are so stuck on the image of Jasper, a Destabilizer clutched in each hand as she shoved you into the interrogation room with her chest, that you almost don't see Yellow Diamond fire.
When you do, it is too late.
Peridot only has time to yip before her tiny body, so full of wonder and love, cracks, crumbles, and blows away. You don't even see her gem hit the ground. A Sapphire's frost grips you, arresting thoughts and feelings both – cold, implacable, and as hard as a Diamond herself.
You are almost grateful when Blue Diamond touches the sides of her head again, ripping the tears from you and allowing you to fall.
Pushing yourself to your knees, you lift a hank of the ocean and strike Blue Diamond in the neck with it. The tears evaporate from her face and everyone else's, and you watch from the side of your eye as Amethyst digs a green triangle from the sand and shelters it in a pink bubble, sending it back to the Temple with a flick of her wrist. A barrage of other weapons joins your water.
Yellow Diamond's hand blazes again, and this time you do not miss her intentions. She is focused on the Gem next to you – Bismuth – leveling toward her chest, on her inward-pulling gemstone.
You have never seen what happens when Destabilizing energy meets the gem and not the physical form, and yet it is easier than you would like to imagine it.
Time slows then, the tide coming for the shore one droplet at a time. Bismuth stands there, her fists even now in the shape of hammers, and you will never be able to escape the knowledge that her solid arms once shoved Steven toward a lake of lava and that her feet once turned and walked away, leaving you to be discovered by Homeworld Gems who carried mirrors along with their helmets and swords. That energy can hit her, and it can all be over.
Your back grows rough, as though your gemstone is made out of broken glass. It is a tight, dangerous feeling, one you remember from when you were her, when Jasper turned ocean water to ice, a solid weapon to use against the Crystal Gems, while you lay helpless beneath your shared consciousness. You could do nothing then, but your limbs are working now; you can do something, and yet a dark facet of yourself whispers to you to step aside and let it be. Your heels begin to move away.
On your other side, Steven whimpers. He is a better person than you will ever be. You turn, look him in the eye, and you know it will be the last time you can do so if you do not at least try to save Bismuth.
Without granting yourself any anticipation of what is to come, you leap in front of Bismuth, arms spread wide to shield as much of her as you can, and take the hit right in the chest – your chest, where no gem resides.
You have been in pain before. This is not pain. This is a thorn driving into every cell of your manufactured body as it forces them apart. Someone screams, and you know it is you, but you don't recognize the sound, high-pitched and piercing. As your view of the beach begins to chip away, you are only grateful that Peridot is not awake to watch this happen.
Once again, Bismuth is the last sight you see before your world inverts and pulls you down with it.
She isn't smiling this time.
The world has turned red and been shredded. Dr. Drakken stands there, holding his fist to his mouth. He just watched his girlfriend's body break into pieces and be scattered in the wind. The ground is shaking too hard for him to remain upright, and he smacks down on all fours, each gasp like a blast from one of his old doom rays.
Lapis, Lapis, Lapis! I just got you back!
Before he can spiral too deeply into the black hole of helplessness, though, he sees a small, blue stone clink delicately into the sand. Drakken finds his feet – right where he left them, though he could have sworn they'd deserted him – and bolts across the dunes, calling her name. People move around him, shouting and slinging weapons, but they are like flannel-graph figures as he drops to his belly and skids in the sand toward the gem-that-is-his-girlfriend, as he reaches forward and lifts it – her.
Her gem is okay. Her gem is okay, so that means she is okay, right? Right?
Drakken cradles it gently in his trembly hands. It is, he notices strangely, the shape of the eyelet stitch Mother uses on all the doilies she hand-knits for the women in her bridge club. Beautiful. He expects to feel it pulsing with life against his fingers, pulsing with her, but it is silent and stony. Of course, it's stony – it's a stone! That is the dumbest adjective he could have possibly used, and right here in this moment, Drakken hates words, hates the noises around him, hates everything that dares to keep going and urge him to come with it when the world's been shredded. Does no one notice?
A vine caresses the gemstone's surface. Drakken didn't feel the thing poke its way out of his neck, not through skin that's all greasy with sweat and tears. Then the realization revs through his mind, leaving flames behind it:
I! Have! Powers!
And then the flames burn everything else up, the ocean and the hand-ships and the rest of his friends surrounding him. Nothing exists but him and his flowers and his girlfriend-in-a-gemstone resting in his hand and the giant yellow wax figurine who surveys them all with a blasé expression that would suggest she just flipped channels instead of annihilating two of his favorite people. Golden eyes. Golden fingertips. Golden everything but the heart. As if a living toxin has been pumped into his chest, Drakken can feel it infesting his lungs and creeping further onward to find his resolve, his good sense, and his conscience.
Lapis's scream still plays on a loop inside his ears. He has never heard her cry out before. She has never let herself cry out before, and considering the things she has faced without uttering so much as a peep, that is downright sickening.
"Stay with me," Drakken whispers to Lapis, just in case she can hear him, and tucks her into his pocket. One look at the grooves surrounding Yellow Diamond's frown, and he wants to rip them from her face. The dark toxin in his spirit wiggles Drakken's conscience back and forth until its roots spring loose and it pops free, like a baby tooth.
If that is a mixed metaphor, Drakken doesn't care! Not about that, and not about anything else. How can he? Everything has narrowed on the flashing golden target in front of him, a laser's trajectory replacing his eyesight, and a bass drum in his brain pounding out two syllables again and again:
Destroy. Destroy. Destroy!
Drakken unleashes a guttural snarl and a hale, hardy vine that he sees rather than feels. It shoots upward too rapidly for him to get a good look at it, but if his hypothesis about them channeling his emotions is correct, he's pretty sure he just grew a Venus's flytrap. With thorns.
It climbs up and up and up and up and up, farther than Drakken knew his vines could go, until it smacks Yellow Diamond right between the peepers.
A good start. But nowhere near enough.
Drakken sends out a second vine, a third, a fourth, a fifth, a sixth. Also an ability he didn't know he had. He stands there, enveloped by the steel-strong vines that will do anything he commands them to, power humming through him like radium, potent enough to glow in the dark.
Potent enough to destroy them both – him and Yellow Diamond – right where they stand.
The second and third vines coil around Yellow Diamond's wrists and begin the boa-routine on them. The fourth entangles in the rocket-flames of hair slicing sharply away from her scalp. The fifth forces itself into her armpits before Drakken remembers that Gems can't be tickled into submission and redirects it to blindfolding her.
Yellow Diamond reacts to the first four vines by – well, by not reacting to them. She just stares at them as though this is the strangest thing she has ever witnessed, even though she has been attacked with soda cans, lost a thumb-wrestling contest to a disembodied arm, and is currently being jabbed at with a spear that Pearl pulled out of her head, sort of a reverse sword-swallower. And that's all just within the last half hour.
The fifth vine, the blindfold, though – that she reacts to. She tightens her muscles, or whatever the Gem equivalent is, and snaps the vines in two. They come boomeranging back to Drakken, screeching in pain. The stillness of Lapis's gemstone is heavy in his pocket. He can only hope and pray that means she is no longer in agony.
By the time those five vines break, though, Drakken has already launched a sixth, his blindest and shakiest aim yet. Yellow Diamond reaches out and pinches the vine between two forked fingers, scissor-fingers, only she doesn't cut them. Instead, she just barely shrugs one shoulder, and in that single, nearly imperceptible move, her evil yellow energy convulses down the vine, scorching away its green, coming straight toward him.
The instinct to fight and the instinct to flight crash into each other inside Drakken, canceling each other out and rooting him to the ground. This is it. He's going to die.
(And without ever having figured out what happens to dry ice if you melt it, at that!)
But it doesn't end like that. Next thing Drakken knows, Garnet has body-slammed him to the ground, keeping her palm flat on his face. With one blunt-force heave of a gauntlet, she knocks the vine out of Yellow Diamond's grasp before she can shock Drakken through it.
Heartbeat banging in his forehead, his toes, and everywhere else in between, Drakken goes limp against the damp sand. Everything is fine. Garnet has saved him – except that the fingers holding him down feel bulky, not all like Garnet's fingers, which are long but cigarette-slim. And wouldn't he be feeling her gauntlets, anyway, not her fingers?
Drakken raises his head just in time to see the hammer at the end of his rescuer's other arm morph back into a hand. And sure enough, the one that presses his cheeks down is blue-gray – cadet gray – gripping with tenderness he never would have accredited to her.
"Would you leave him alone?" Bismuth chucks this comment directly at Yellow Diamond. "He's not even part of this!"
The triumph Drakken expected to see in her expression is nowhere to be found. In fact, if he's not mistaken, her lips quiver as she yells. He would thank her – for more than one thing – if his speech capacity hadn't just gone AWOL on him. He will probably spend the rest of the day hunting around for it.
Yellow Diamond glances down at Drakken as if registering his presence for the very first time. Indifference reclines smoothly on her face, uglier than anger would be. She shakes her head – one, two, three times that Drakken needs to count, because his girlfriend's body was just reduced to rubble right before his very eyes, and doggone it, he has to make sure that arithmetic still works!
His throat clenches tight around the baseball he thought he might have swallowed earlier, its stitches threatening to burst through. The part of him that turns hurt into cruelty is alive and click-ticking away, slipping back into place more easily than Drakken did behind the wheel of the Doom-Vee when Cousin Eddy's turn to drive was over. He has to look at something other than Yellow Diamond, or else he will rip that enormous yellow gemstone right out of her chest and tap-dance on it. And Steven, who loves Lapis so much, would not like that.
But the only thing that can possibly compete, attention-wise, with Yellow Diamond is her blue counterpart, folded into the pockets of her cloak like a candy bar someone is trying to shoplift. Some blue-raspberry-flavored variety. Bismuth charges toward Blue Diamond, every bit the star football player, and for a moment Drakken wonders vaguely which Diamond she served, or was supposed to serve, before finding the rebellion. They seem to be grouped by color – which strikes Drakken as oddly backward for a race so technologically advanced – and perhaps Bismuth is not truly blue, but she is certainly closer to blue than to yellow. Of course, he doesn't know how many Diamonds there are back on Homeworld…
And then Bismuth's fist glows, and Drakken has to avert his eyes. It is necessary, it is deserved, but he's already watched it come down on blue once when it was neither of those things, in the reflection Lapis rippled to life for him. He can't watch it come down on blue again.
That leaves him turning to the vexatious Yellow Diamond again. The way she stands, the uninterrupted aureate blaze fifty feet straight up and down on her, reminds Drakken of one of those golden cobras coiled up on fancy Egyptian headdresses he's seen. Amethyst's whip flies out and collides with Yellow Diamond's belly. It makes the same sound a two-way sprocket-spring makes when you throw it against a varnished wood wall when you are upset, because after going to all the trouble of breaking into a place, knockout-gassing the security guards, and fleeing Kim Possible, it turns out you hoisted the wrong size and now it doesn't fit into your brain-tapping machine. Yellow Diamond bats the whip away, no more wounded than if Amethyst tried to attack her with a cat toy.
Drakken wishes he could stuff her huge head into a brain-tapping machine right now. (Yellow Diamond's, that is. Amethyst's is smaller and far kinder.)
"Wait! Stop, guys!" calls a voice that is still journeying through puberty. "Diamonds, I need you to stop and listen to me!"
Drakken jerks around to see Steven, as much as he can see through the protective layer of pink. The child has his shield hoisted above him, forming a dome that he stays hidden in, looking like nothing more than a teddy bear up against the forces of evil. His eyes are pleading.
Blue Diamond spits out a hollow laugh, a bigger, darker version of what Lapis sprays over her pain to kill it. Drakken's gut wrenches. "Why in the stars would we listen to you, Rose?" she says, proving her own point – she doesn't listen worth two hoots. Not even one hoot.
Yellow Diamond cuts her off with a slicing hand motion. Her nostrils are pouched out to the sides, and oh gosh, he was wrong – he wants the indifference to come back – it was lovely compared to this. "Listen to you?" she says, and it is so flat when it shouldn't be that Drakken half expects the sky to split open behind her, vent her rage where she can't. "You start a civil war that decimates our population, you remove any hope that we can ever trust our own Gems again, you steal Pink from us…and now you expect us to listen to you?"
She is faster than Drakken would have expected from someone as Amazonian-and-then-some as this woman is. The next thing he knows, she has lifted her foot. In what would ordinarily be the span of time between heartbeats – although all of Drakken's are sort of running together right now – Yellow Diamond brings her heel down hard on the pink shield, stamps, twists.
There is a sick silence, the kind that comes right after your leg touches a security laser and right before the alarms begin to blare.
Drakken's mind is a jumble of fractured syllables, calculus symbols, and music from the trailers of movies where you know half the cast will be dead within the first half-hour. Above it all roars, No, no, nonoonononono….!
Dear God, not Steven, too!
Yellow Diamond lifts her shoe and slides it backward across the sand. As if she is cleaning off a roach she just squished. Drakken claps the back of one hand to his mouth to keep from puking on the nearest clump of beach grass. A vine wraps his middle, and two more support his legs, and Drakken knows they are the only things allowing him to remain standing.
Greg yells something that Drakken has no trouble hearing, but can't for the life of him process or translate or begin to understand. All around him are shouts of horror, shrill and desperate with the possibility of grief.
And then Drakken is sprinting across the sand, faster than he has ever gone but still not fast enough, hollering nonsense sounds at full supervillain-volume, his treasured Lapis's gem bumping against his hipbone, his hands ready and willing and hopefully able to perform CPR if need be.
Steven lies smack on his back on the beach, his little-boy face gone limp and peaceful like he's asleep. Or like…
Oh, for the love of every scientist that ever lived, he's asleep!
Hyperventilating around the baseball, Drakken shoves two fingers toward Steven's neck to confirm this theory. He can already feel his own pulse in their tips, which may prevent him from getting a clear reading – yes, that's right, think of it as an instrument that needs to be checked. But once Drakken touches Steven's carotid artery, he discerns a steady, even pump that can't be his own, because Drakken's pulse is spotty and all over the place.
The tension drains from Drakken's joints. Without it, he flops onto the sand, catching himself on one knee at the last minute. He glances up at Probably-Connie, the girl on Steven's other side, and nods at her. There are no words, and maybe there never will be again.
Connie, too, has fallen to her knees, clutching two fistfuls of black tuxedo. Beneath them, the white part rides up, and Drakken is further relieved – if relieved is strong enough a term – to see Steven's gem in one round, pink piece. "Steven!" Connie says. "Steven, wake up! Please!"
The tears in her eyes match the ones Drakken has just now noticed barreling down his cheeks. When it comes to making you cry, Yellow Diamond is even more skilled than Blue Diamond. Drakken turns on her with what he knows is wrath blazing across his face. He knows, both logically and geologically, that there is no substance on Earth capable of scratching a diamond.
But he's never been more eager to challenge the laws of nature.
Evidently, he is not the only one. Garnet, Amethyst, and Pearl exchange Roman-triumvirate glances and join hands, and that's all they have to do, join hands before there is an explosion of white light, and Drakken jumps like a springhare even though he was expecting it this time. Fuchsia Fusion stands beside him, rising about to the Diamonds' rib cages – or whatever they have instead of rib cages. Every gemstone – the one on her forehead, the one on her chest, and the two on her hands – lights up, and what seems to be every type of weaponry that Drakken used as décor in his old haunted-island lair comes spilling out.
Next to Fuchsia Fusion, Bismuth has not been idle, either. Her gem dips in like a misplaced belly button, so when it glows her entire chest flickers with light that makes her appear translucent. From the depths of it, she yanks out a length of chain, one that keeps coming and coming and coming – to the point where Drakken could almost believe he's watching a magic show and not a battle that could end them all. At the end of its endlessness is a steel ball, the kind prisoners wear in old-timey movies before they switched to handcuffs.
No. He needs to not think about handcuffs. His lungs are already weak – apparently breathing nothing but your own recycled air for a five-minute stretch doesn't sustain a body very well. Any idiot can guess that.
Bismuth flicks the chain against a tumble of rocks, and the clatter disturbs the hairs straight up on Drakken's arms. She grabs the black ball on the end and twirls it over her head as though it weighs no more than a slingshot, around and around until Drakken is dizzy and his vines can't find their ways back out. "Who's the Junk-Cut now?" she snarls. "Take this!"
Before she can toss it, though, Yellow Diamond's voice flogs the air. "Everyone! Stop!" Her hands come out to her sides, hushing up all the humans, Gems, and lions within a two-mile radius, and if Drakken didn't know better, he'd think she was trying to keep her balance, about to keel over from some shock he can't fathom.
Blue Diamond's eyes are dripping again. "Pink?" she calls, hesitant, the way a person does when they're afraid to believe the UN has really just informed them they will be receiving a gold medal for saving the planet.
Yellow Diamond's cold golden eyes narrow, but the corners of them wobble ever so slightly and sneakily. "No…it can't be."
Drakken isn't sure if he grabbed Connie or she grabbed him. Either way, neither of them is letting go anytime soon.
Blue Diamond lifts her head, tilts it back so that the cloak falls away and her hair hangs in graceful thunderclouds around her gem. Her face contorts, not quite a frown, but certainly nothing as mundane as a smile. "She…she's here," she says, so delicately that Drakken wouldn't have been able to hear it before he got so much practice listening to Lapis.
As the tears begin to drizzle, raining down on the beach, her gaze drops to Steven's inert form.
Drakken throws his hands heavenward. "That's what we've been trying to tell you!" he yelps.
But before she can get any further, a big man flips into the midst of the fray, approximately the same height as Steven's lion with hands meaty as pork chops and a black-and-blue color scheme that makes him appear bruised. The colors alternate in a not-quite-checkerboard pattern on the jumpsuit that stretches over his chiseled torso. The guy's jut-jaw, squarer than Drakken's, and the black mask surrounding his eyes aren't immediately familiar – if they ring a bell, it's a distant, muffled peal.
That jumpsuit, though…he knows that jumpsuit. He loves that jumpsuit.
"Never fear!" Lion-Man's booming declaration is almost enough to impress even the infamously stentorian Dr. Drakken. "Team Go is here!"
With a jerk of his head, he indicates a purple man and two reddish-haired boys lined up behind him. Errr, make that eight reddish-haired boys – they just performed some never-before-seen form of cellular division that hasn't reduced them any in size. No, they're leaving that to their purple brother, who shrinks to well-nigh-invisible proportions and squeaks, "Hey, ladies. Everything all right?"
Fuchsia Fusion disintegrates, and Pearl stares down at the violet speck addressing her. "I…yes. I believe it is now," she says. Her words are small and fluid and as shaky as the fingers she folds in front of her. Craning her neck toward the Diamonds, she asks, "Is everything all right?"
A bewildered nod from the golden-cobra head. The flowing blue one ducks and begins murmuring, loose-lipped, "Her aura. I could see her aura – in Rose."
"Aww, man. When Dr. Director called us, I thought we'd finally gotten a real alien-fighting gig," says one of the duplicating boys. Or maybe one of the duplicated ones. Drakken's lost track.
And it is in that moment that he recognizes them. Jumpsuits. Superpowers. Names that all end in go, if he's not mistaken.
They're Shego's brothers. The ones who bug her so much, the ones that always push a groan from her as soon as she spies them. There's something about that, and about the stringy weakness in his muscles that realizes the whole battle is over – it's over! It's over and no one is dead, and they have finally cleared up a misunderstanding that's been going on for millennia. Yes, something about the whole thing is positively hilarious.
As Pearl explains in her smooth, mesmerizing rhythm that not all aliens are enemies of humans, Drakken sits down with a plunk in the sand and begins to wail out laughter.
Now he just has to wait for Lapis to come back. He is looking forward to relearning how their hands fit together, looking forward to being not-too-close to someone who is decidedly, thoroughly there without a tangible, heated presence to pull sweaty anxiety from him, looking forward to watching her tie one arm around her knees – casually, now, no longer in fright – and surveying him quietly with her still-waters-run-deep eyes and praising his appropriate use of water symbolism. He even looks forward to stammering and stuttering his greeting, because he knows it will make her giggle, a sound he hasn't heard in far too long. And even though it's been months and months since she left Earth, Drakken knows he's about to enter what will seem to be the longest waiting-stretch of all.
But that stretch begins moving much faster when Steven stirs behind him.